Forrest Bess

Forrest Bess PDF Author: Chuck Smith
Publisher: powerHouse Books
ISBN: 1576876756
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Painter, fisherman, pseudo-hermaphrodite—Forrest Bess lived his life in obscurity at an isolated bait camp off the east coast of Texas. From 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, alongside superstar artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Rediscovered after his death in 1977, Bess's small visionary paintings are now prized by museums and collectors for their primal beauty, and can fetch over $200,000 apiece. Bess's treasured canvases were only part of a grander theory—based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals—that proposed that hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. As an artist, Bess could never equivocate, and in 1960 he underwent an operation to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. For the first time ever in print, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle combines the beauty of Bess's art with the drama and tragedy of his personal life. Using Bess's own hauntingly sincere words (in letters to Betty Parsons, Meyer Schapiro, and others) the book traces the life and logic of this forgotten artist and explains how a love of beauty and a desire for wholeness lead Bess to self-surgery and, ultimately, a mental hospital. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle is a fascinating look at one of America's most notorious cult visionaries—a man who truly believed that art could save his life.

Forrest Bess

Forrest Bess PDF Author: Chuck Smith
Publisher: powerHouse Books
ISBN: 1576876756
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
Painter, fisherman, pseudo-hermaphrodite—Forrest Bess lived his life in obscurity at an isolated bait camp off the east coast of Texas. From 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, alongside superstar artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Rediscovered after his death in 1977, Bess's small visionary paintings are now prized by museums and collectors for their primal beauty, and can fetch over $200,000 apiece. Bess's treasured canvases were only part of a grander theory—based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals—that proposed that hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. As an artist, Bess could never equivocate, and in 1960 he underwent an operation to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. For the first time ever in print, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle combines the beauty of Bess's art with the drama and tragedy of his personal life. Using Bess's own hauntingly sincere words (in letters to Betty Parsons, Meyer Schapiro, and others) the book traces the life and logic of this forgotten artist and explains how a love of beauty and a desire for wholeness lead Bess to self-surgery and, ultimately, a mental hospital. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle is a fascinating look at one of America's most notorious cult visionaries—a man who truly believed that art could save his life.

Midcentury Modern Art in Texas

Midcentury Modern Art in Texas PDF Author: Katie Robinson Edwards
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292756593
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was Texas, where artists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons from Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe, while still responding to the state's dramatic history and geography. This barely known chapter in the story of American art is the focus of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas. Presenting new research and artwork that has never before been published, Katie Robinson Edwards examines the contributions of many modernist painters and sculptors in Texas, with an emphasis on the era's most abstract and compelling artists. Edwards looks first at the Dallas Nine and the 1936 Texas Centennial, which offered local artists a chance to take stock of who they were and where they stood within the national artistic setting. She then traces the modernist impulse through various manifestations, including the foundations of early Texas modernism in Houston; early practitioners of abstraction and non-objectivity; the Fort Worth Circle; artists at the University of Texas at Austin; Houston artists in the 1950s; sculpture in and around an influential Fort Worth studio; and, to see how some Texas artists fared on a national scale, the Museum of Modern Art's "Americans" exhibitions. The first full-length treatment of abstract art in Texas during this vital and canon-defining period, Midcentury Modern Art in Texas gives these artists their due place in American art, while also valuing the quality of Texan-ness that subtly undergirds much of their production.

Heat Waves in a Swamp

Heat Waves in a Swamp PDF Author: Charles Ephraim Burchfield
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN: 9783791343808
Category : Art, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A comprehensive overview of the artist's work focuses on Burchfield's expressive watercolors and includes drawing from his 1917 sketchbook, camouflage designs from his tour in the army, and wallpaper designs from the 1920s.

Central to Their Lives

Central to Their Lives PDF Author: Lynne Blackman
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611179556
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Scholarly essays on the achievements of female artists working in and inspired by the American South Looking back at her lengthy career just four years before her death, modernist painter Nell Blaine said, "Art is central to my life. Not being able to make or see art would be a major deprivation." The Virginia native's creative path began early, and, during the course of her life, she overcame significant barriers in her quest to make and even see art, including serious vision problems, polio, and paralysis. And then there was her gender. In 1957 Blaine was hailed by Life magazine as someone to watch, profiled alongside four other emerging painters whom the journalist praised "not as notable women artists but as notable artists who happen to be women." In Central to Their Lives, twenty-six noted art historians offer scholarly insight into the achievements of female artists working in and inspired by the American South. Spanning the decades between the late 1890s and early 1960s, this volume examines the complex challenges these artists faced in a traditionally conservative region during a period in which women's social, cultural, and political roles were being redefined and reinterpreted. The presentation—and its companion exhibition—features artists from all of the Southern states, including Dusti Bongé, Anne Goldthwaite, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Ida Kohlmeyer, Loïs Mailou Jones, Alma Thomas, and Helen Turner. These essays examine how the variables of historical gender norms, educational barriers, race, regionalism, sisterhood, suffrage, and modernism mitigated and motivated these women who were seeking expression on canvas or in clay. Whether working from studio space, in spare rooms at home, or on the world stage, these artists made remarkable contributions to the art world while fostering future generations of artists through instruction, incorporating new aesthetics into the fine arts, and challenging the status quo. Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provides a foreword to the volume. Contributors: Sara C. Arnold Daniel Belasco Lynne Blackman Carolyn J. Brown Erin R. Corrales-Diaz John A. Cuthbert Juilee Decker Nancy M. Doll Jane W. Faquin Elizabeth C. Hamilton Elizabeth S. Hawley Maia Jalenak Karen Towers Klacsmann Sandy McCain Dwight McInvaill Courtney A. McNeil Christopher C. Oliver Julie Pierotti Deborah C. Pollack Robin R. Salmon Mary Louise Soldo Schultz Martha R. Severens Evie Torrono Stephen C. Wicks Kristen Miller Zohn

Magnolias All at Once

Magnolias All at Once PDF Author: Norman Fischer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780935162806
Category : Buddhism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Poetry. Translation. "Norman Fisher has created, for the time being, the perfect introduction to Leslie Scalapino's poetics. MAGNOLIAS ALL AT ONCE offers a set of commentaries on Dogen, the astounding medieval Japanese Zen writer, by the mind-bending contemporary American poet Leslie Scalapino. Or, to put it the other way around: in this set of uncannily paired texts, Scalapino provides a step-by-step guide to reading Dogen. Fischer has written new and provocative translations of Dogen that, against all logic, put the Zen master at the center of modernist and contemporary radical poetics. Magnolias concludes with Fischer's illuminating, essential essay/interview on Scalapino's work. In this work of collaboration and elegy, Fischer adeptly generates conceptual bumps and gaps, crackling flashes that make momentarily perceptible the disappearing vistas of time's viscous inebriations." Charles Bernstein"

How Not to Kill Yourself

How Not to Kill Yourself PDF Author: Set Sytes
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
ISBN: 1621067025
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A highly imaginative and relatable guide for anyone who needs the reassurance that suicide is NEVER worth it. Are you inclined to escape the crumminess of everyday life into fantasy worlds? Are you smart and imaginative in a way that isn't really suited to your surroundings? Are you definitely misunderstood, likely angry, and almost certainly depressed? Set Sytes, hailing from the UK, would prefer you stay alive and sort things out rather than the alternative, thanks. He figures there are better opportunities for you out there and lays it all out in a way that's compelling, funny, sharp, and useful. This zine turned book (please don't call it a self-help guide, asks the author) is ultimately about how to be a person in the world. It can be done non-miserably, we promise.

The Eagle's Talons

The Eagle's Talons PDF Author: Dennis M. Drew
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781585660254
Category :
Languages : da
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Amerikanske Revolution; Amerikanske Borgerkrig; Første verdenskrig; Anden Verdenskrig; Koreakrigen; Vietnamkrigen; Krigen mod Mexico; Spansk-amerikanske krig;

Outliers and American Vanguard Art

Outliers and American Vanguard Art PDF Author: Lynne Cooke
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226522272
Category : Art and society
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Some 250 works explore three distinct periods in American history when mainstream and outlier artists intersected, ushering in new paradigms based on inclusion, integration, and assimilation. The exhibition aligns work by such diverse artists as Charles Sheeler, Christina Ramberg, and Matt Mullican with both historic folk art and works by self-taught artists ranging from Horace Pippin to Janet Sobel and Joseph Yoakum. It also examines a recent influx of radically expressive work made on the margins that redefined the boundaries of the mainstream art world, while challenging the very categories of "outsider" and "self-taught." Historicizing the shifting identity and role of this distinctly American version of modernism's "other," the exhibition probes assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture. The exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art.--Provided by publisher.

A Sojourn in Paradise

A Sojourn in Paradise PDF Author: Howard Philips Smith
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827538
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 835

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Book Description
Jack Robinson made his name as a much-sought-after fashion and celebrity photographer during the 1960s and early 1970s, and his work is well documented in hundreds of pages of Vogue, the New York Times, and Life, as well as other publications. However, his personal life remains virtually unknown. In this study of Robinson and his photography, Howard Philips Smith takes an in-depth look at Robinson’s early life in New Orleans, where he discovered his passion for painting, photography, and the Dixie Bohemian life of the French Quarter. A Sojourn in Paradise: Jack Robinson in 1950s New Orleans features more than one hundred photographs taken by the artist, accompanied by detailed commentary about Robinson’s life in New Orleans and excerpts from interviews with the people who knew him when he lived there. Robinson’s photographs of New Orleans reveal the genesis of two unique and fascinating facets of the city’s history and culture: the creation of the first gay Carnival krewes who would make their own unique contribution to the rich cultural history of the city and the formation of the Orleans Gallery, one of the earliest centers of the contemporary art movement blossoming in 1950s America. This detailed study of Jack Robinson’s early life and photography illustrates the contributions of a gifted, gay artist whose quiet spirit and constant interior struggle found refuge in New Orleans, the city where he was able to find himself, for a time, free from society’s grip and open to exploring life on his own terms.

The Final Girl

The Final Girl PDF Author: Kris Rose
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
ISBN: 9781648411106
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
Kris Rose and her step-sister grew up watching horror movies together. The Exorcist, The Evil Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Carrie, Friday the 13th, Scream, Hellraiser, and so many more left their indelible mark on her young mind. "For a girl whose life was not perfect, horror was a reassurance that darkness was a normal part of life. It was possible to survive the absolute worst, if you learned a few valuable lessons from one of the most well-known archetypes of modern horror: The Final Girl." Rose takes us on a fun, smart, sassy tour through horror movies of the 1980s, analysing the character tropes and celebrating the bad-asses who may not have been believed but fought to stay alive until the bitter end.